Michele Simon, president of Eat Drink Politics at her home office in in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday July 3, 2012. Simon heads a group in Oakland that aims to expose corporate food companies for peddling unhealthy foods to children and low income people.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Michele Simon, president of Eat Drink Politics at her home office...

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A screen shot of the cover of a report by Michele Simon, president of Eat Drink Politics, at her home in Oakland, Calif., poses the question, are corporations profitng from hungry Americans? Simon heads a group in Oakland, that aims to expose corporate food companies for peddling unhealthy foods to children and low income people.

Washington -- As Republicans prepare to cut billions of dollars from food stamps, a Bay Area activist has stirred a hornet's nest on the left by questioning how much the program ends up benefiting corporations that peddle soda, candy and other junk food to low-income people.

Michele Simon, a public health expert in Oakland who has battled food marketing to children, issued a report last month, "Food Stamps: Follow the Money," that called the program the "largest, most overlooked corporate subsidy in the farm bill."

Simon opposes cuts to food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP and renamed CalFresh in California. But she said the best defense is to make sure the program is doing its best to help the poor, rather than Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Mars and General Mills.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture does not collect data on what people buy with food stamps. Tobacco, alcohol, pet food and vitamins are banned, but candy, soda and ice cream are allowed.

The program makes up 80 percent of the almost $1 trillion farm bill passed by the Senate on June 21. The program has quadrupled in size since 2001, doubling when the Bush administration expanded access and again as the Obama administration bolstered benefits and millions of Americans lost their jobs in the recession.

One in 7 Americans and 1 in 10 Californians - or 3.7 million people in the state, more than half of them children - received benefits last year. The program accounts for more than 10 percent of all grocery spending.

Loop of subsidies, junk food

Next week, Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee plan to cut $16 billion from the program over the next decade, almost four times more than the $4.5 billion cut in the Senate bill.

The nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California said the maximum benefit for a single person in California earning $903 a month is $200 a month, and for a family with three eligible members and earning $1,526 a month, the benefit is $526. California's participation rate is among the nation's lowest, with about 53 percent of those eligible receiving benefits.

Food activists have long criticized subsidies to corn and soybean farmers, arguing that they fuel obesity by making junk food inexpensive. But the big money in the farm bill has always been in food stamps.

Simon called the system a "twisted closed loop" that subsidizes purchases of junk food made from subsidized commodities.

Banning junk food purchases would not make diets more healthful, would be too complicated to administer, and would be "disrespectful and demeaning to low-income people," said Jessica Bartholow, legislative advocate for the Western Center on Law and Poverty, an antipoverty group in Los Angeles.

"Low-income people in America already have so few food choices that narrowing their options is something we absolutely don't support," Bartholow said.

The food industry and antihunger groups helped bury a bill last year in the California Legislature by state Sen. Michael Rubio, D-Bakersfield, to ban purchases of soda, candy, ice cream, cupcakes, doughnuts, potato chips and other such items with CalFresh money.

Bad diets in all income levels

While poor people have higher rates of obesity, the Agriculture Department says their diets are not much worse than the U.S. average.

"The truth is, all Americans need to be making healthier choices," given the epidemic obesity, said Matthew Marsom, vice president for public health policy and advocacy at the Public Health Institute, a nonprofit in Oakland that is staying neutral in this fight.

Bartholow accused "a very select group 0f people in the public health community" of trying to reduce obesity in the entire U.S. population by limiting choices of "very poor people who already have very few choices for where they shop and what they buy. There is no public health intervention that has improved lives or the health of low-income people that has gone at it by reducing people's options."

Simon said that limiting food stamp purchases would not be complicated because computerized inventory systems tell retailers exactly what people are buying. Recipients get benefits through electronic cards swiped at the cash registers of food retailers.

She also questioned why limiting purchases would be any more paternalistic than restricting purchases to people in the federal Women, Infants and Children program, which provides supplemental food benefits for mothers and their young children.

"We are perfectly comfortable telling mothers how they should eat and how they should feed their children, and yet we seem to have a different set of standards" for the broader food stamp program, Simon said.

Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University who tracks food debates, said in an e-mail that it is "time to consider the idea of limits. Obesity was not a problem when food stamps started. Now it is. The WIC program limits purchases that can be made with vouchers."

Food stamp recipients, she said, "could still buy what they like - just not with taxpayer dollars."

The program's roots go back to the 1930s, when the government sought a way to rid farmers of surplus food while aiding the poor. It has been backed ever since by rural conservatives and urban liberals.

The groups have quashed attempts to limit food stamp purchases of junk foods in nine states, including California and Texas, Simon said in her report.

Bartholow said antihunger groups have not "compromised their positions in any way" in working with industry. If food stamp recipients "want to have a root beer float on a Friday night with their family, none of that is different" from the positions those groups have held for years.